Main navigation

Review: Allied

School is the bane of my existence. Luckily, it appears that the theaters got the memo that I wouldn’t have much time to see movies, because not many have come out recently, and if they have come, they don’t look like very good ones.

There was your overly-raunchy comedy that would probably suck (Bad Santa 2), your completely sterilized, cute kids cartoon that everyone would worship for being a sterilized, cute kids cartoon (Trolls)… and honestly, Rules Don’t Apply looks like a mediocre movie.

So I chose the one with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, two generally great actors, in a film about two spies in World War II. It seemed so promising for a movie that turned out to be a massive narrative turd…

Allied is a film with some decent competencies for all of its flaws, but the flaws are all-consuming, and the entire spectacle eventually feels aimless, tired, and smacked together out of obligation.

Brad Pitt himself gave a particularly dry performance. There wasn’t one part of the movie where his character sold me. The first half, he plays this stiff, emotionless oaf that didn’t convince me that he was an effective secret agent. The second half, he goes completely off-the-wall bonkers.

Marion Cotillard, on the other hand, managed to provide a decent performance that intrigued me and made me want to know more about her character. Unfortunately, the second half completely wastes her development, and nothing else happens with her character that isn’t boring or nonsensical.

On top of all of this, Cotillard’s performance is so sabotaged due to the fact that she’s tied down to this romance between her and the oddly incompetent Pitt. They never sold me on their romance, and they never convinced me that they worked particularly well together. Cotillard’s character is portrayed is this emotionally masterful agent that has perfected the art of social stealth and deception, and Brad Pitt is a stick in the dirt that is constantly nay-saying or unintentionally sabotaging the mission.

Then, once they finally get home, get married, have a baby, etc., Pitt is eventually informed that Cotillard is likely a German spy, and is given specific instructions on what he has to do to prove whether or not she is.

He then takes these orders and shoves them up his butt apparently, because he spends half the time acting like a suspicious weirdo around his wife, and spends the rest of the time half-hazardly investigating in a way that could easily sabotage the whole investigation and/or put other peoples’s lives in terrible danger.

Eventually Brad Pitt turns into an absolutely unlikable buffoon. What’s worse is that they never do anything truly interesting with this mystery of whether or not Cotillard is a double agent.

The longer the movie goes on, the stupider it gets, and by the time it was all over, I was irritatingly waiting for the whole thing to just end. The ending of the movie tries to cash in on all of these supposed emotional payoffs, but considering they didn’t even establish anything to pay off of, the whole movie absolutely falls apart.

The soundtrack for this movie was at first competent enough to emphasize emotional moments, but after a while, I felt like it was becoming overplayed. They seemed to play the same thing over and over again, and it would have been better if I didn’t notice the music at all.

The cinematography was actually nice and smooth at times, but considering that’s really the only truly positive that I have to say about it, I don’t think that matters too much at all.

Allied is an aimless film that wastes the talents of their two leads by making one boring, stiff, and irritating; and making the other one lose all of her intrigue before the movie is even halfway over. The entire movie itself never really seems to try to accomplish anything spectacular except for maybe the romance, which they didn’t sell well anyway. This is a dumb film, and you shouldn’t waste your time on it.

Like this:

2Comments

While I cant say I disliked this movie as much as you ( or even at all ) I can agree that it lacks a certain depth. There was no commentary, no subtext, just what was on the screen. I did like the first half more than the second… would have been happy if that had been all there was.